I was unable to string words into a sentence. “I er … I er …” I kept repeating.
“Sir, can you please stay out of this,” the male officer said brusquely and authoritatively to Hans, his hand up in the air while brushing past him.
“You can’t just barge in here. This is my practice,” Hans said, his eyes flaming, jabbing a finger into his chest. “And for the record, my colleague’s name is Doctor Smits.” There was an air to him that I’d never witnessed before.
The officer yielded, muttering something of an apology, and then turned his attention back to me. “Doctor Smits, can you please come with us? You will be interrogated at the station by one of our detectives.”
I was clinging onto the bannister, trying to remain upright and thinking, this can’t be happening. “There must be a mistake,” I croaked. “You’ve got the wrong person …”
The male officer interrupted me. “You can explain it all at the station. If you give your full cooperation now, we won’t need to cuff you.” There was something menacing in his demeanour that made me surrender.
I advanced a few steps and the two officers sandwiched me by the shoulders as the male one began intoning his lines. “You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be …”
His words whizzed past me as Simone dashed out of my consultation room, holding my handbag in her hands. “Here, take this with you,” she said, a look of concern on her face.
I clutched my belongings to my chest. “Thank you,” I whispered. My hands were trembling as I turned to Hans. “Can you please call my mother and ask if Tim can stay another night with them?” Although I could hardly imagine that I wouldn’t be able to rectify this ridiculous accusation in the blink of an eye, I wanted to make sure that Tim was in good hands in case it took longer than anticipated.
“Of course. I’ll relay the message.” Hans held me by the shoulders, ignoring the on-looking officers. “Hang in there. This is all clearly a big misunderstanding,” he attempted to reassure me, but I could see a flash of doubt in his eyes.
I limped alongside the female officer, who held a hand firmly on my back, as if I were a high-risk felon about to make a run for it. I turned my head and looked back, and saw Simone and Hans gawking at me with slumped shoulders and dangling arms.
During the drive to the police station, which only took a few minutes, my thoughts were racing in circles. My life had completely spiralled out of control – how on earth was it possible for them to believe that I had anything to do with Sandra’s death? The more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder whether I’d misunderstood them. Perhaps they just wanted to interrogate me to get more information on the case? Surely they would soon realise I was not the one at fault when they heard the sound recording on my phone. I drew a sharp breath and slowly released the air out of my lungs, leaned back and stretched my legs, feeling more confident of a good outcome.
After the male police officer parked the car in front of the station – a place I’d visited not long ago – his female colleague opened the door for me and gave a nod, indicating I should exit the vehicle. I unbuckled my seatbelt and slid across the back seat to the opened door, glad to leave the musty smelling interior. Both officers were awaiting me on the pavement with stern looks. Meekly I trudged in between them to the entrance of the building, where I’d recently met with Detective Armstrong under entirely different circumstances. I shook my head – this was clearly all due to a misapprehension on their part. I was confident that as soon as Detective Armstrong saw me, he’d recognise there had been a mix-up.
We strode past the reception area, where a handful of lingering tourists dressed in brightly coloured shirts were gawking at me, and I bowed my head in humiliation. We advanced to the stairwell, where I was summoned to descend. Once we reached the basement floor, we turned right entering a long and narrow corridor, faintly illuminated by fluorescent tubes and I sensed a claustrophobic feeling welling up inside me. For a moment I was afraid that I’d have another hyperventilation attack, just as I’d had in the first few weeks after Oliver’s death. I admonished myself and kept on setting one foot in front of the other.
At the end of the passage, the male officer pulled a key ring from his belt and unlocked the door. “Take a seat over there,” he said, gesturing towards the other end of the room.
I inched into the white room, which lacked any form of natural light, and smelled damp and stuffy.
“Do you want some water?” the female officer asked, a look of pity flitting across her face.
My mouth felt dry as I opened it to speak for the first time. “Yes please.”
The door closed behind the two officers with a loud, metallic click, leaving me alone in this confined space, wondering what I’d soon be faced with. There was this gnawing fear in the pit of my stomach that I was overlooking something.
After a few minutes the female officer returned with a plastic cup of water. I brought the cup to my mouth using both hands, but I was shaking so violently I spilled water on my shirt, sending a chill all over my body – it was freezing cold in here.
“The detective will be with you any minute,” the officer declared and left again, the clang of the metal door slamming shut reverberating around the room, and in my head.
I let my gaze wander around the small space – the room was no bigger than a few square metres. Apart from an air vent high against the outside wall, there was nothing but four white walls, a steel door, and a table with two plain, wooden chairs. My phone had been confiscated before I’d stepped into the police car and as there was no clock I lost all sense of time, while the feeling of apprehension continued to grow.
After what seemed to have been an eternity, the door suddenly swung open and there was the familiar face of Detective Armstrong. I was about to jump up in relief – as soon as he set eyes on me he would surely realise there had been a massive error – until I noticed the precarious expression on his face. Something was seriously wrong.
“Doctor Smits,” he said formally and shook my hand as I slowly rose. “I am sorry to see you again under these circumstances.”
I tried to clear my throat and respond in a light-hearted fashion, as if we were old acquaintances crossing paths, catching up and exchanging pleasantries, but the words seemed unable to leave my lips.
The detective lowered himself onto one of the hard chairs and gestured that I should follow his example.
I sank down on the edge of my chair, gnawing my lower lip, the tip of my shoe uncontrollably tapping the floor under the table.
“Try to relax, Mrs Smits,” he said, his voice carrying loudly in the small room.
I shifted back a bit in my seat.
He placed a tape recorder on the table, pressed a red button and verbalised the names of the attendees, the date and the time.
Then the detective directed his attention to me. “As you have been informed by my colleagues, you are being held under suspicion of involvement in the murder of Sandra delaHaye.” “Detective Armstrong,” I exclaimed nonplussed, jumping to the edge of my seat again. “This must be a mistake, I don’t know …”
He closed his eyes and swiftly raised his hand, causing me to trail off and slowly sink back into my chair.
I tried to pull myself together – you must stay calm Jennifer, I tried to soothe myself.
“So why don’t you tell me: where were you on Monday morning, the third of January, the day that Mrs Sandra delaHaye ended up under a tram?”
My thoughts went back to that time when I wasn’t in a good place. After I’d made a few blunders at the practice, I’d taken two weeks off on the advice of Hans. During that time Sandra and I sneaked into Mason & McGant twice in the middle of the night.
“I was at home,” I answered ruminatively. “Alone.” During the day Tim had continued to attend his day-care as usual and I immediately recognised my solitude wouldn�
��t work to my advantage.
The detective’s impenetrable eyes and inscrutable countenance gave little away. “You’re a general practitioner, right Mrs Smits? Can you tell me what a doctor does at home by herself on a Monday morning?”
My brain jumped into the highest gear while I considered all options – was it wise to get it all off my chest, or would it work against me and would I be better off making up a story?
“I’d been struggling with a few difficult situations at the practice, so my colleague suggested I take a few weeks off.”
The detective’s eyebrows raised a few centimetres as he spoke with a jeer in his tone. “You were put on leave?”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said, rejecting his suggestion indignantly. “I just wasn’t feeling like myself,” I elaborated, making light of the dire straits I’d been in. I took a deep breath and then decided to lay my cards on the table. “After my husband’s death, I found out he’d cheated on me – it devastated me. Added to that, I’d returned to work way too soon after he died. But I didn’t recognise any of that until I started falling apart,” I said, gazing down at my feet. “I have a very considerate colleague who made me realise that a little breather would do me good.” The thought of the always-supportive Hans almost reduced me to tears.
“I see,” the detective said, his head tilted upwards, smoothing his moustache with his fingers, but I could tell from his face that he didn’t fully believe me. This man here before me was nothing like the indifferent detective I’d spoken to before – I’d underestimated him.
He leaned over the table and slowly and deliberately repeated the question. “What exactly did you do on that Monday?”
I shifted in my chair, feeling unsettled as I racked my brain, but it was as if the information was shrouded in mist. “I barely recall the details of those two weeks that I was off – it’s all rather hazy.”
The detective rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You just said you were at home.”
I rubbed my palms together vigorously, stifling a whimper. “Yes I know. It’s very well possible, but maybe I was …”
He leaped up and cut in on me in a loud harsh voice that echoed in the hollow space, causing me to cringe. “Maybe you were what?”
I started to stutter. “I’m not sure, I may have run an errand, or taken a stroll around the block. My son attended his day-care centre so I spent my days pottering about the house by myself – it’s all become a big blur.”
“So let me recap: Your career was on the skids and you found yourself in a real predicament when you discovered your errant husband was fooling around with another woman.” He stood behind the table, towering over me, and rocked on the balls of his feet for a while, his eyes locked onto mine.
Then the detective broke the silence. “Maybe I need to refresh your memory on your whereabouts on the day the victim died? You were in the Baarsjes district that morning.”
“The Baarsjes?” I echoed. That was the neighbourhood where Sandra’s accident had taken place. I shook my head, a feeling of anxiety growing in the pit of my stomach. “No, no, I certainly was not there.”
He narrowed his eyes, his thumb and index finger holding his chin. “You just claimed you weren’t sure.”
“I hardly ever go there, I surely would have remembered,” I said, but a little seed of doubt had been planted in my brain. Perhaps I had gone for a little errand – hadn’t I been to a hardware store that day? I’d used the two-week break to catch up on a few odd jobs at home.
Detective Armstrong started pacing up and down the room, silence reigning for a moment, arms clasped behind his back. I followed his movements, my eyelids fluttering, while the train of thoughts in my head continued unabated.
The detective suddenly came to a halt, swivelled and advanced towards me. He placed his hands on the table and slowly leaned forward, without so much as a flicker of emotion in his icy eyes, until he was so close the smell of coffee on his breath made me queasy.
He spoke ever so softly that it was almost a whisper. “We have your telephone information. At the time of the accident you were less than ten metres from Sandra delaHaye.”
I shook my head in total disbelief with bulging eyes, my voice sounding shaky and weepy. “That’s impossible, there must be a mistake.”
He retreated and seated himself in the chair, pinning me with a stare.
I was desperately trying to think if I was overlooking something. Was it possible, that by chance, I had been in the area that morning when Sandra died? It seemed too great a coincidence. I floundered – my mind just went blank.
The detective folded his arms over his chest. “Did you know we spoke to the driver of the tram that slammed into Sandra?”
I snapped to attention: Archie – the man in the flat on the third floor. The tormented expression on his face was etched in my memory. “That man, that poor man, I have seen …”
He cut straight across me. “Yes,” he said with a drawl. “You paid him a visit, didn’t you?”
“I wanted to learn more …” I muttered, but again the detective didn’t let me finish and continued his monologue.
“That tram driver stated straight after the accident that it was an atypical event. Sandra came from the right and suddenly shot across the tram track, in broad daylight, while her body was leaning back. For the longest time, we had no explanation for it other than pure bad luck, until we recently spoke to him again – Archie suggested there was someone present, giving her an extra push, so that she wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“Yes, I know!” I yelled, taking exception to his concealed accusation. “He told me this too, but that person wasn’t me.”
My objection seemed to fall on deaf ears. “You posed as an occupational health physician,” the detective went on. “What were you doing in that man’s flat?”
I felt my cheeks glow. “I wanted to know what had happened to Sandra,” I managed to utter. “I got the impression that something was wrong – that it wasn’t simply a freak accident.”
The detective stared past me and mused as if I weren’t there. “We often see this – perpetrators of a felony obsessing over it and returning to the crime scene in the aftermath.”
I dug my fingers into my thighs. “No, it wasn’t like that. Not in the slightest.”
“Witnesses have stated that you sneaked into Sandra’s memorial service keeping a low profile at the back of the auditorium and scuttled off after just a few minutes. It all ties in with the same obsessive pattern,” he said in a contemplative tone, as if he were a philosopher trying to work out a new theory on human behaviour.
I opened my mouth to clarify why I’d decided to pay my last respects back then, but it seemed that everything I said was being misinterpreted, so I kept silent.
The detective stood up and started strutting around the tight chamber again while formulating a hypothesis. “If you ask me, it all happened on a whim. You hadn’t planned it, it was a spontaneous action.”
I shook my head, muted as the consuming fear grappled at my throat.
“Perhaps you arranged to meet her there that day? Go for a girls-only shopping-trip, or enjoy an early-afternoon cocktail. You’d wormed your way into her life, had even become rather chummy by then, or were you feigning it all?”
I shook my head again, but the detective hardly seemed interested in my response and continued pacing around, unravelling the layers of his conspiracy theory.
“She came to your appointment on her bike, you may have gone there by tram.” He waved his hand airily. “We still have to fill in the blanks, but in all frankness – they’re trivial. She was waiting to cross the track, until tram twelve, with poor Archie behind the controls, had passed. Maybe you and Sandra had just had an altercation, or perhaps she had a suspicion, an inkling of what you were up to. Or maybe you were just fed up with her, because let’s be honest here – after screwing around with your husband, she just had it coming, didn’t she?”
“No!” I screamed like
a wild hyena, my eyes on fire, hurling my words at the pale stony face. “No, it’s not true. I didn’t do it.”
The detective failed to respond to my denial, but strode back to his chair, lingering. Then, in what seemed like slow motion, he laid his hands out on the table in front of me, inching closer with piercing eyes, before whispering the final blow. “We found a piece of DNA on the luggage carrier of the bike. Alas, the sample didn’t match with anyone in the National DNA database of convicted criminals, and seemed unusable …” the detective was so close I could see his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed, “… until we ran the sample through the DNA kinship database. Turns out your father was being a good citizen years ago when he heeded the call to find a rapist.” The detective bared his teeth in a grimace. “He probably never anticipated playing a pivotal role in indicting his daughter for murder.”
There was the sound of a pop in my head. Suddenly I heard a loud beep in my right ear. I blinked a few times and gasped for air. The room started spinning around me and I grabbed hold of the table.
“I want a lawyer,” I breathed.
He pressed his lips in a tight line. “Sure, we’ll get to that in a minute. One last thing.” He leaned his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers, resting his chin on them. “You have a son, right? A sweet little boy, does he look like you?”
“Like his father,” I mumbled, feeling an unprecedented fear welling up deep inside.
“Sad to think a toddler will have to grow up without his mother and his father. Perhaps he has nice grandparents who’d be willing to raise him?”
I jumped up as an uncontrollable frenzy steamed within me. “I demand a lawyer. Now!”
The detective waved his hands. “Calm down, ma’am. You’ll be allowed to make that phone call in a minute. You’ve had a flawless past – only one mammoth misstep. It’ll be hard to convince the judge it was murder in the first degree, but manslaughter should be well within reach.” He folded his arms and leaned back. “Four years, that’s my offer. If you choose to decline, you’ll take the risk of being incarcerated for the maximum of fifteen years in prison. By the time you get out of jail, your dear son is already going to college.” He pushed himself out of the chair, advanced a few steps towards the door before swivelling around. “However, if you confess, you’ll be reunited with your little munchkin before he starts reading, provided you show good behaviour. Take your time and reflect on my proposal with your lawyer.”
Double Deceit Page 31
